


In the Blood

by fawatson



Category: Black Jewels - Anne Bishop
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 08:18:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14016114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/pseuds/fawatson
Summary: The duties of a Priestess.





	In the Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Desiderii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desiderii/gifts).



> **Requests:** (a) Please no character death and no focus exclusively on children, (b)Priestess caste, (c) Darker Jewels who do not serve at Court. 
> 
> **Disclaimer:** I do not own these characters and make no profit by them.

Tamara had always been aware it was her duty to serve at Court, however unpleasant that fate had appeared when Dorothea held power in Hayll and Alexandra Angelline ruled just down the road.  Her pretty green peridot was not the darkest jewel.  A few witches gifted with a fire opal could command more power than she with her translucent yellow-green jewel.  Nonetheless, technically green was considered more powerful than opal, and her pale little jewel held a considerable reservoir of power.  So few could command that power:  one’s duty to one’s kind said it should be put to good use; and she was no longer a child.  Reluctantly Tamara resigned herself, aware of a hollow sinking feeling inside as she steeled herself to leave home to join Court.

But loyalty to the Blood and one’s own land only went so far.  Her older sister had not been lucky:  within two weeks of making her offering to the dark and gaining sapphire, Gemma, a promising young Queen, had been raped and broken by Blood males who were never identified, though rumours were rife.  Her parents were determined Tamara should have a better life.  And so, when the potential shown through her summer-sky birthright jewel was fulfilled, they finally spoke frankly, gave her money and a map, and helped her by hiding her disappearance long enough so she was able to escape Hayll undetected.

The service fair had been confusing to a country-bred witch who had never before been further from home than the two villages either side of her own; but she had secured a contract on the first day.  Tamara had dutifully served in the second circle at one of the District Courts in Glacia, completing her required service contract without any difficulty.  She had stayed on afterward to be with her husband, a purple-dusk-jewelled Warlord.  Theirs was a good marriage, like a comfortable old cardigan that keeps the cold out; but they were not blessed with children.  He was killed in one of the first attacks on Kaeleer in the opening days of Hayll’s war.  Without him, she felt no deep yearning to remain in Glacia; and the hollowness inside her had always been left unsatisfied by Court life.  Once the Black Queen’s purge was past, and life had settled back to normal so she need not feel she was in some way shirking her duty, Tamara had resigned from Court.

She returned to Chaillot to visit her family; but there was no place for her there.  Her mother and sister were long dead.  Unable to live with unhappy memories of his old life, her father now kept an inn on the main road to Dena Nehele, having married the widow of the previous inn-keeper.  He was pleased to see her, to know she had done well, but he could not offer her a home.  Nor, once the stock of past memories was recalled, was reminiscence sufficient to keep them together.  Toward the end of her visit Tamara had walked out toward the edge of town to burn incense before the graves of her mother and sister, and leave a coin or two with the groundskeeper for their upkeep.  She had never left; the pull had been so strong as she climbed the steps to the Altar that she had known her calling.

The Sanctuary was the most important in the area, and well-endowed by Chaillot’s wealthy burghers.  All the town councillors and merchants brought their children here for their Birthright Ceremonies.  Later they would return to be married.  But while its wealth was readily visible in gold chalices, fine mosaics, and stained glass, in other respects the Sanctuary was poor and neglected.  The purge had decimated Chaillot’s Blood and where before there would have been a team of priestesses to serve the needs of the District Court and its surrounds, now there were only three, none of whom held a darker jewel.  That afternoon Tamara had moved her belongings to the Priestesses’ lodgings and begun her apprenticeship, feeling more at home than she ever had since she had left her mother’s house in Chaillot as an inexperienced witch of just seventeen summers. 

Here was a sisterhood dedicated to the Blood - _all Blood_ \- not just the powerful. Here women who preferred the company of women could serve with honour, even distinction, without being seen as the anomaly who were not mated or bound in the intricate dance between Witch and Warlord. Here women who had lost their mates (and, given the hair-trigger tempers and infamous territoriality of Warlord Princes, their inevitable disputes and swift rise to the killing edge _always_ left widows) could find a way to serve without pressure to seek a new partner. Here there was solace and sisterhood. 

One morning, a few weeks after she had made her vows of service as Priestess, Tamara walked on a whim three miles beyond the town limits, and then a few hundred yards up a mountain trail to a meadow covered with star flowers that had clearly been carefully planted in spiral patterns.  She arrived in time to officiate over the burial of one small village's much loved priestess.  The village folk had dug a grave to one side of the meadow.  She watched as they laid the former incumbent into the hole and lovingly buried her first in flowers before covering her with earth.  Then they showed Tamara the snug stone cottage, already cleared of the old priestess’s personal belongings.  They led her across the stepping stones which spanned a stream that emerged from a wide-mouthed cave.  The Altar Tamara found inside was illuminated naturally through a vent in the rock overhead and guarded the way to an inner, still larger, cavern where a perilously steep set of steps set into the side of a crevasse, seemed to lead endlessly downwards.  Who had carved those steps, no one now knew.  They had been there before records began.  What they were there for?  Clearly to go _down; _but what awaited an explorer was not known for no one had descended those steps in living memory.__

__When she asked, the local people told Tamara a tale of one man having essayed them two hundred years ago; but he had never returned.  No one had tried since - certainly not the Priestesses who periodically came to serve at the Sanctuary, for they had too many duties to perform to the living and the recently living to do more than keep the Sanctuary light burning.  As long as the local folk could remember, they told her, there had never been more than one Priestess at a time, with a new incumbent arriving shortly after the previous died.  Other Sanctuaries had been abandoned for lack of Blood to serve, but never this one._ _

__Their expectations were clear.  But she had colleagues waiting for her back in Chaillot, she protested. She had only planned a morning’s walk. Still ... she had never left._ _

__Her clientele here were different.  This Altar had not been discovered by the rich folk who lived nearby.  The villagers had little to spare and she was paid in kind:  chickens and cabbages more often than coppers (rarely silver, still less gold).  As the sole Priestess, she expected to be lonely; but the villagers visited often, and she became a confidante to the young, adviser to those in their middle years, and comforter to the elderly.  She even held embroidery classes for the girls.  Every year, one of the older boys, dissatisfied with traditional life, spent the winter in the cot beside the inglenook fireplace, and worked off his frustration cutting wood for her fire and shovelling snow from the walk between her front door and the Sanctuary, while he decided what to do with himself.  Usually spring brought the youth’s Offering to the Dark and he would leave the village for greener pastures, to be replaced by another disgruntled boy when the seasons turned cold again._ _

__Tamara discovered the reason this Sanctuary had never been abandoned during her second year, when she ventured around the edge of the crevasse to the other side of the cave to find another passage to a third, much smaller cave and a Dark Altar.  It took her three weeks to pluck up enough courage to try it.  She arrived close to the Isle of the _Cildru Dyathe_ , empty now save for the victims of No Face.  She played tag with them that afternoon, and cuddled the youngest before returning across the bridge to the Altar. _ _

__“It took you long enough to arrive,” remarked Saetan acerbically._ _

__“High Lord,” she stammered, and bowed her head.  With a flick of his fingers he dismissed her; and Tamara backed out, focused her power, and swiftly found her way back to her own Sanctuary.  She had spent twenty years in Kaeleer without crossing _his_ path and never felt the lack.  She was glad not to see him again, though she made weekly visits to the children from then on. _ _

__Both Altars were simple, the one carved lovingly from oak which had darkened through centuries of beeswax, the other made from ebony inlaid with silver.  She kept both polished now.  When the cloth on the Oak Altar grew threadbare, the villagers embroidered another and would have thrown out the old. Tamara shook her head and took it from them.  In the quiet of her quarters that year, she used craft to spin thread from silver and jewels collected in the Dark Realm and rewove the altar-cloth. In Spring the next year, as she spread the shimmering cover on the Ebony Altar, she made another discovery:  a book – no … a journal - which had been kept by her predecessor, plus a set of instruments, and vials of blood miraculously kept fresh through a tangled web of craft imbued with sufficient power to survive long past the last priestess’s death._ _

__There was another cave at the back of the Dark Altar, well-lit as all the interconnecting caves were, but tiny, with only enough space for a small table and chair and a set of shelves for the instruments and her writing materials.  Tamara took to spending much of her spare time there.  Her studies were begun out of a sense of duty:  whatever had been so important must be something she ought to know.  However, as she learned, her interest was sparked until - like the witches before her - she became consumed by curiosity. _It took her the better part of a year to decipher the cramped handwriting of not just the last priestess, but the three who had served before her.  Next there came a certain amount of trial and error to make sense of the instructions for the instruments.   Tentatively she made enquiries and found a tiny handful of priestesses involved in similar studies, none _quite_ the same. Quarterly they met, shared results, debated, and speculated, each arguing _her_ approach would yield answers, before each priestess returned to her solitary pursuits. _ _ _

__

__Winsols came and went and Tamara’s long mouse-coloured hair, already winged with grey at the temples when she arrived, turned white and thinned.  Girls she had taught to embroider left home to set up shop in Chaillot and points further, and sent back new altar-cloths and fancy robes for special celebrations as presents.  Rebellious boys, who had sought their fortunes and honour in battle, wrote her for advice.  Children whose Birthright Ceremonies she had presided over, got married and had children in their turn.  Ten years ago, when she visited Chaillot for her father’s funeral, she also went to the oculist.  Five years ago, she took another trip down the mountain and her distance spectacles were joined by reading glasses.  Hers was a good life, a useful life.  And she was content … mostly._ _

__

__Tamara let out a deep sigh as she peered through the microscope.  She had so carefully prepared the glass slide, hoping that this time her work would yield the answer.  Which was just silly, she reminded herself.  It doesn’t work that way – _nothing_ works that way.  And each trial brought her a little closer to the solution even when it didn’t provide a definitive ‘answer’; she _knew_ that.  But I am getting old, she thought, as she rubbed fingers that ached with arthritis.  And I am not from one of the long-lived races.  She had a growing awareness of her mortality.  She had started this research confident she would _find the answer_ ; after years of trying she knew how optimistic that had been.  Still, she tried; and each experiment ruled out another dead-end.  True, there might be hundreds more still to try; but there were hundreds fewer now than there had been when she took up her task.  And there was nothing more she could do today:  she had other duties, no less important, which awaited. _ _

__

__Tamara donned her green robe for the marriage ceremony.  Its silk was shot through with gold thread, a generous present from a former pupil who was now the foremost couturier in Hayll.  The village fiddler played a suitably romantic piece as the wedding party approached.  She smiled as she witnessed the pair's solemn vows to one another.  The day before they had provided her with their rings.  These she had blessed and left in the Sanctuary overnight; and they now rested on an emerald green velvet cushion on the Oak Altar, until the proper point in the ceremony.  When she offered them to the newly-wed couple, they placed them on one another’s fingers.  The whole village had accompanied the family to wish them well, for young Jenny and Ender were well-liked by all.   All clapped and cheered when, after a final blessing, Tamara turned husband and wife around to face the crowd.__

__

__The sun is shining on this marriage literally as well as figuratively, she thought, as she sat on a bench set just outside the Sanctuary while the matrons set up the marriage feast on trestle tables.  She watched them circulate amongst friends and family.  Jenny’s hair shone like gold in the bright sunshine and Ender’s rich brown gleamed with red highlights.  She was the stronger:  a deep-rose jewelled Healer; but while his jewel was only yellow he was a Warlord Prince.  Tamara had taken their blood samples:  she had not had blood samples from a rose Healer nor a yellow Warlord Prince until yesterday, had never _heard_ of such before.  There were none such in the records she had inherited.  She had had such high hopes that testing _their _blood samples would give her the solution.  But (her thoughts went back to the microscope in her little laboratory) they had only added information.  She was still searching for that elusive quality in the blood which made them Blood.  It was there, somewhere; she was sure of it.___ _

__

____“Priestess?”_ _ _ _

__

____Lost in her inner musings Tamara had not noticed another young couple approaching her.  They were not from round here, but were two of Jenny’s friends from Hayll come to celebrate their wedding._ _ _ _

__

____“We were wondering,” the girl began hesitantly, “if you would bless our marriage before we go back to town?”_ _ _ _

__

____“Don’t you want your families round you?” asked Tamara gently._ _ _ _

__

____“I don’t have any,” the girl said, “I’m an orphan.”_ _ _ _

__

____“And my family disowned me when I said I planned to marry Elaine,” said the young man._ _ _ _

__

____“Why?”  They looked like two perfectly nice polite young people to her, Tamara thought.  She could not imagine what the objection could be; but if his family had good reason she would refuse to perform the ceremony. “ Don’t lie,” she added sternly, “I _will_ know.”_ _ _ _

__

____Elaine hesitated, then whispered, “I only hold a white jewel.”_ _ _ _

__

____“So?”_ _ _ _

__

____“But I’m a Queen, only I’ll never have a Court with just the white.”_ _ _ _

__

____“My family thought I was throwing away my career to leave the second circle of a District Court for her,” explained her swain._ _ _ _

__

____“And what are _you_ then,” asked Tamara. _ _ _ _

__

____“Tiger-eye Warlord Prince.”_ _ _ _

__

____Tamara felt her face crease in a wide smile as her excitement grew: _another_ rare combination!  Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the Blood lines – the final piece perhaps?_ _ _ _

__

____“There is a blood test I always do before I perform the ceremony….”_ _ _ _

__


End file.
